The Weather In Africa - Softcover

Martha Gellhorn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140050590 ISBN 13: 9780140050592

Publisher: Penguin, 1979

Synopsis

Martha Gellhorn's three intertwined novellas are concerned with the integration of European outsider into the dramatic landscape of East Africa. It is a story of rejection and enchantment. Two sisters, one beautiful, one plain, return unmarried from their adventures in the great to their parents' hotel on the mountain, where they are caught up in a scandalous relations with an African official and an English botanist. A heartbroken woman tries to escape the memory of her son's death on a doomed holiday by the sea. A lonely, awkward young Englishman, disorientated by years as a prisoner-of-war, orphaned by bombs in London, seeks a new life in the highlands.

About this title

Review:

An authentic sense of the divorce between Africa and what Europeans carry in their heads. -- Robert Nye, The Guardian

Brilliantly told and so atmospheric. -- Sharon Griffiths, The Northern Echo

I think anyone who picks up this book is certainly not going to put it down again. -- Francis King, Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio 4

This is a pungent and witty book. -- Jeremy Brooks, The Sunday Times

This is a stunningly good book. -- Victoria Glendinning, The New York Times

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

There was much talk when Jane and Mary Ann Jenkins came home to Mount Kilimanjaro. Mary Ann had been gone for only two years in an American city no one ever heard of, called Cleveland; but Jane was away for twelve long years, cutting a swathe in Europe, so the locals understood. Gone into the wide world, far from this mountain, to make their fortunes, and returned to the ancestral hotel with no fortune and unmarried, both of them.

All the Europeans knew the Jenkins family and all had something to say about the surprise reappearance of the Jenkins daughters. In Moshi, they talked at the hotel bar, the post office, the best general store, the petrol station, the bank; up and down the mountain, they talked in the farmers’ homes when the ladies had a bridge afternoon, at Sunday lunch parties, in matrimonial beds. Henry McIntyre, who’d farmed coffee on Kilimanjaro longer than living memory, delivered the majority verdict: ‘Those poor gormless girls have made a proper balls of it.’

His wife said, ‘Girls?’ lifting her eyebrows.

Jane was thirty-two and Mary Ann thirty.

Everybody sensed defeat, the end of great expectations. Bob and Dorothy Jenkins, the parents were overjoyed. They had no idea that people were talking about their children.

All the resident Europeans found a chance to take a good look at the prodigal daughters. Everyone was curious about the changes wrought by time and absence. Jane had been a dewy English rose, with golden hair and big blue eyes, spoiled rotten by her parents. The dew had definitely dried off, which gave satisfaction; Jane had been too fond of herself, too pleased with her appearance, though no one could say she was by any means a hag now. Mary Ann looked pretty much the same. She didn’t look like her parents, any more than Jane did. Jane the beauty. Mary Ann, officially the homely one. Mary Ann was all shades of brown and average features. Jane had the tall lean elegant body of a fashion model; Mary Ann was short, with a bosom and waist and hips. No man thereabouts had ever laid a hand on either of them. It had always been an unspoken sour assumption that the Jenkins girls were waiting for a better bet: Kilimanjaro and environs were not good enough for them.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1979
• ISBN 10: 0140050590
• ISBN 13: 9780140050592
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240